Thoughts From Eric » Observationshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts
Things that Eric A. Meyer, CSS expert, writes about on his personal Web site; it's largely Web standards and Web technology, but also various bits of culture, politics, personal observations, and other miscellaneous stuffThu, 30 Jul 2015 14:58:05 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.4-RC1Warning Hashflagshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/#commentsTue, 05 May 2015 19:41:16 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3270Over the weekend, I published “Time and Emotion” on The Pastry Box, in which I pondered the way we’re creating the data that the data-miners of the future will use to (literally) thoughtlessly construct emotional minefields—if we don’t work to turn away from that outcome.

The way I introduced the topic was by noting the calendar coincidence of the Star Wars-themed tradition of “May the Fourth be with you” and the anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 1970, and how I observe the latter while most of the internet celebrates the former: by tweeting some song lyrics with a relevant hashtag, #maythe4th. I did as I said I would…and Twitter blindly added a layer of commentary with a very simple little content filter. On twitter.com and in the official Twitter app, a little Stormtrooper helmet was inserted after the hashtag #maythe4th.

So let’s review: I tweeted in remembrance of a group of National Guardsmen firing into a crowd of college students, wounding nine and killing four. After the date hashtag, there appeared a Stormtrooper icon. To someone who came into it cold, that could easily read as a particularly tasteless joke-slash-attack, equating the Guardsmen with a Nazi paramilitary group by way of Star Wars reference. While some might agree with that characterization, it was not my intent. The meaning of what I wrote was altered by an unthinking algorithm. It imposed on me a rhetorical position that I do not hold.

In a like vein, Thijs Reijgersberg pointed out that May 4th is Remembrance of the Dead Day in the Netherlands, an occasion to honor those who died in conflict since the outbreak of World War II. He did so on Twitter, using the same hashtag I had, and again got a Stormtrooper helmet inserted into his tweet. A Stormtrooper as part of a tweet about the Dutch remembrance of their war dead from World War II on. That’s…troublesome.

You might think that this is all a bit much, because all you have to do is avoid using the hashtag, or Twitter altogether. Those are solutions, but they’re not very useful solutions. They require humans to alter their behavior to accommodate code, rather than expecting code to accommodate humans; and furthermore, they require that humans have foreknowledge. I didn’t know the hashtag would get an emoji before I did it. And, because it only shows up in some methods of accessing Twitter, there’s every chance I wouldn’t have known it was there, had I not used twitter.com to post. Can you imagine if someone sent a tweet out, found themselves attacked for tweeting in poor taste, and couldn’t even see what was upsetting people?

And, as it happens, even #may4th wasn’t safe from being hashflagged, as Twitter calls it, though that was different: it got a yellow droid’s top dome (I assume BB-8) rather than a Stormtrooper helmet. The droid doesn’t have nearly the same historical baggage (yet), but it still risks making a user look like they’re being mocking or silly in a situation where the opposite was intended. If they tagged a remembrance of the 2007 destruction of Greensburg, Kansas with #may4th, for example.

For me, it was a deeply surreal way to make the one of the points I’d been talking about in my Pastry Box article. We’re designing processes that alter people’s intended meaning by altering content and thus adding unwanted context, code that throws pieces of data together without awareness of meaning and intent, code that will synthesize emotional environments effectively at random. Emergent patterns are happening entirely outside our control, and we’re not even thinking about the ways we thoughtlessly cede that control. We’re like toddlers throwing tinted drinking glasses on the floor to see the pretty sparkles, not thinking about how the resulting beauty might slice someone’s foot open.

We don’t need to stop writing code. We do need to start thinking.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/feed/7Ramping Uphttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/01/06/ramping-up/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/01/06/ramping-up/#commentsTue, 06 Jan 2015 16:32:29 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3151We were driving back home from our impromptu surprise family vacation in Tennessee, winding our way through the Appalachian Mountains, when I pointed out a long, steep ramp to nowhere branching off the side of the highway. “What do you think it’s for?” I asked the kids.
Photo by Bidgee (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU)

They made some guesses, some quite clever, but none correct. So I told them about runaway truck ramps and how they work. I think they were vaguely interested for a few seconds; I got a well-isn’t-that-interesting grunt, which I’ll take as a win. We swept on past, the kids went back to whatever they were doing before I’d interrupted them, and I kept my eyes on the road.

But I was still thinking about the runaway truck ramp, and how it’s a perfect physical example of designing for crisis.

I also wondered about the history of runaway ramps—when they were first implemented, and how many runaway vehicles crashed before the need was recognized and a solution found. After I got home, I looked it up and discovered that ramps didn’t really exist until the 1970s or so. Even if we assume that no vehicles lost control in the U.S. until the Eisenhower Interstate System was established in the 1950s (just go with it), that’s still two decades of what were probably some pretty horrible crashes, before a solution was implemented.

I feel like web design is at the pre-ramp phase. We’ve created a huge, sprawling system that amplifies commerce and communication, but we haven’t yet figured out how to build in some worst-case-scenario features that don’t interfere with the main functioning of the system. We’ve laid down the paths and made some of them look pretty or even breathtaking, but we’re still not dealing with the crashes that happen when an edge case comes onto our stretch of the road.

I’ve been pondering whether to incorporate this particular example into my 2015 talk, “Designing for Crisis”—much will depend on how the talk stands after I go back through it one more time to tighten it up, and start rehearsing again. If there’s room and a good hook, I’ll add it in as a brief illustration. If not, that’s okay too. It’s still given me another way to look at designing for crisis, and how that topic fits into the broader theme that the Facebook imbroglio brought to light.

I’m still trying to get a good handle on what the broader theme is, exactly. “Designing for Crisis” is a part of it, but just a part. Several people have told me I should turn that talk into a book, but it never quite felt like a book. Sure, I could have stretched it to fill a book, but something was missing, and I knew it. I thought there was a hole in the idea that I needed to identify and fill; instead, the idea was filling a hole in a context I hadn’t seen.

Now I have. It will take some time to see all of it, or even just more of it, but at least now I know it’s there and waiting to be explored and shared.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/01/06/ramping-up/feed/9Apopheniahttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/11/14/apophenia/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/11/14/apophenia/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 20:12:22 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3089
My next big project is to form a rock band called The Why and release a double-length concept album titled “Apophenia”.

Kat and Carolyn were in New York City this past weekend for a brief trip, and when they got back Kat was in a bad way. I picked them up from the airport and Kat’s symptoms were such that I drove her straight to the Cleveland Clinic ER on suspicion of a cardiac event. (It wasn’t.) With the help of friends, I got the kids off to their scheduled activities and stayed with Kat. By late in the afternoon, we knew she’d be staying overnight, and we decided that I should go to be with the kids.

I gathered up the backpacks and dirty clothes from their weekend trip, slung them over my shoulder, and then stood at Kat’s bedside, holding her hand. Not speaking, just standing. Eventually she gave me a small smile and said, “Go on.”

“I know it’s stupid, but I’m afraid to. The two times I walked away from Rebecca in a hospital, it didn’t end well.”

We spent our last few hours of innocent ignorance in an emergency room in New Jersey, getting Rebecca rehydrated and hoping to figure out what was going on. She was so lethargic and tired, and we feared spinal meningitis. As the day wore on, she seemed stable, neither better nor worse, but one of us had to go get the other kids. We decided to have Kat stay, since she was the medical professional. I gave Rebecca a hug and kiss, told her I loved her so much and to feel better soon, and walked out the door. Not long after that, she had her first seizure.

Just a few months later, after the surgeries and protons and initial chemotherapy and our return back home to Cleveland, Rebecca finally came down with a fever. It was of course at a time that we could only take her to the ER for evaluation, to make sure she wasn’t neutropenic. It was evening, and we were hungry, so I went over to the food court while the last few tests were run before they discharged us. While I was gone, the staff gave Rebecca a routine dose of ceftriaxone, and she immediately had a strong anaphylactic reaction. We had never known she was allergic to it. Antihistamines were quickly administered, and she had to spend the night at the hospital in case the reaction flared up again. It didn’t.

Twice I walked away from a loved one lying in a hospital bed. Twice something went terribly, horribly wrong.

And of course there’s nothing to that but coincidence, but we evolved to spot patterns. It was a survival skill of the savannah, to see how disparate and apparently unconnected events tied together into a cohesive story.

Now we drag it around with us like a growth that we’ve long since ceased to notice. We see stories written in the stars and meaning imposed on our mundanity. The most common question we ask is “Why?”, and that can lead us to wonderful discoveries and insight, but it seems just as often to mislead us into an egotistic reordering of the world. Our obsessive quest for causes can all too easily cause us to invest in illusions. That pattern-recognizer that coils through the hindbrain can and does turn on us.

Think of all the conspiracy theories you’ve ever heard or believed. Think of all the times you’ve heard of something terrible happening to someone and asked yourself why it happened. Think of all the people who get blamed for what has happened to or even near them, regardless of whether we know all they did or didn’t do.

Think of all the Greek or Roman or any other culture’s myths, the stories where some person draws the notice of the gods, who then proceed to punish them for hubris or mischievously grant their prayer according to its letter but opposite its spirit. That impulse is no less strong in us. So many people ask themselves what they could have done differently to avoid their current situation, or what they’ve done to deserve what’s happened to them.

And even our language enforces this view, subtly and persistently. In the last paragraph, I could have written “So many people ask themselves what they could have done differently to avoid their fate”, but “fate” is a concept born of stories. It carries with it meanings of destiny, of supernatural forces directing a specific outcome. I even started to type the word, and then replaced it with “current situation”, which is a far more accurate rendition of what I want to say, but not nearly so poetic.

Not nearly so story-like.

We optimize our language’s patterns to favor the concepts that feel the best to us. All languages do. And in doing so, we not only reflect the patterns we see, but reinforce them. Powerfully. We reorder the way we see the world, we create patterns of filtering, and when we talk to each other we transmit those patterns to each other, self-reinforcing.

I could say the patterns are living, memetic symbiotes, and thus fall victim to the overactive pattern-recognizer in my own hindbrain.

So we ask ourselves what we could have done to save Rebecca. I can and do believe as strongly as I believe anything that there was never any hope for Rebecca. Her genetic makeup, some accident of her conception or fetal development or whatever, meant that she was always going to die of cancer as a child. We could have tried anything from megadoses of chemotherapy to experimental surgery to the latest woo-woo herbal treatments, and she still would have died. All we could affect was how long that took, and what her short life would be like as it came to an end. And we had no way to know which choices struck the best balance of lifespan and life quality.

I like to think that we did well, but for all I know some other set of choices would have given her another six or twelve months with the same quality of life she had. I don’t know, and I don’t torture myself over that; we did the best we possibly could. Perhaps that’s me imposing an absent pattern on disparate points of data again, but she did have great quality of life, up until the last week or so, and we fought ourselves to safeguard that for her. It will have to be enough.

And yet, I still ask myself sometimes if we somehow could have saved her. If there was a moment when the doctors said X, that we were supposed to do Y instead. And there’s that pattern-recognizer, affecting our language again: “we were supposed to”. As if her life was meant to be a long and perfect story, and we were too blind and stupid to see it and fulfill it. As if we failed to understand what we were supposed to do.

That same impulse is only a short step away from taking responsibility for the cancer itself. Wondering if we could have avoided the cancer entirely if we’d fed her a different diet, or lived in a different city with different air, or taken a different approach in infant medications, or to vaccination. Or if we’d been less satisfied with our lives. Maybe she’d be all right if we hadn’t had the impulse to thank whatever gods or demons might lurk beyond the horizon for our lives that seemed so right, and say no more than that; maybe she suffered for our being humbly grateful for what we had and not thinking that we needed to beg for that state to continue. Punished for the hubris of believing that our lives were good and in no need of improvement.

“What did I do to deserve this?” it’s so easy to ask. “What did she do to deserve this? Why her? Why us?”

“Why”. “Deserve”.

Patterns of instinct, encoded in language, enforced in thought, imposed on the world.

Capricious deities, lurking in the clouds. Heroes and monsters, written in the stars.

Twice I walked away from a loved one lying in a hospital bed. Twice something went terribly, horribly wrong in my absence.

So I stood there holding Kat’s hand, wanting to stay with her even if it meant sleeping in a hospital chair all night, because deep in my hindbrain, the pattern-recognizer was screaming that something would go wrong, just like those other times. That she would die if I left.

I squeezed her hand and gave her a kiss, told her I loved her and to feel better, and walked out the door.

She’s fine.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/11/14/apophenia/feed/6Indescribablehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/09/08/indescribable/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/09/08/indescribable/#commentsMon, 08 Sep 2014 19:00:42 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3055A thing they don’t tell you before your child dies, because nobody who knows this would go around proclaiming it unprompted (except, apparently, me) and nobody who doesn’t face this situation would ever think to ask and probably nobody who does face this situation has the meta-awareness to go asking after the truth that they will all too soon have to inhabit, is that the pain of it does not consume you like nuclear fire and leave you a hollow, broken, still-burning shell of ash.

Not continuously, anyway.

It does do that sometimes, much more often in the beginning after the end, but that begins after a while to subside and the moments of overwhelming anguish slowly grow farther and farther apart.

After a while, you don’t even hurt continuously, let alone feel what seems like an endless torment. There are periods of waking time, seconds or minutes or maybe even an hour or two, where you don’t actively remember your child is gone forever, when you aren’t focused on that ungraspable fact. The intervals grow slowly, over time. Because humans can get used to pretty much anything.

The grief remains indescribable, but the nature of its indescribability changes. At first, it is so vast and deep and overwhelming that trying to grasp it is like trying to understand the true size of a galaxy. Those are the moments of fire and ash, when an unexpected, vivid memory or sharp regret brings you to a sudden, blinded stop.

You try not to have them while driving.

Between those moments, the grief is still there, but different. It’s not there in strength every microsecond of every day; it comes and goes. There are times you can put it aside for a while, to concentrate on a demanding task or play with your surviving children or watch a brainless movie. When you become aware of the grief again, it’s surreal and confusing. It’s like trying to understand the true shape and texture of a six-dimensional whale. Even if you could, there’s no way to describe it in words so that someone else can understand.

In those moments of greater awareness, the surreal nature of the grief makes the entire world, your entire being, feel wrong. It warps you and everything you perceive. A previously energetic and focused person can become listless and disoriented, or a fidgety, easily-distracted person can become still and quiet. Anger comes flaring out in strange directions, over stranger reasons.

Recognizing this is difficult, and counteracting it is doubly so. Recovering from it is a long process, the end of which I have not even glimpsed. I can imagine it in some detail, I know which general direction to go to get there, but I cannot yet see it. It is either too far away, or too obscured by the warping effects of the grief. I don’t know which. It could well be both.

But this is why I seem to check out, from time to time. I’m not actually going through an internal hell of pain and torment when I do, which is what I suspect other people suspect. Instead, I’m trying to come to some understanding of the extradimensional horror that always hovers nearby, sometimes right in front of me and other times just out of sight, hoping that if I can somehow comprehend it in its entirety, it will finally go away and allow me to be happy that she lived instead of sad that she died.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/09/08/indescribable/feed/11The Gift of Timehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/08/04/the-gift-of-time/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/08/04/the-gift-of-time/#commentsMon, 04 Aug 2014 16:26:45 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3016Over the past year, we received much assistance, and even more offers of assistance, so many that we were humbled and a little overwhelmed by it all. In the process, I came to realize that one type of assistance was far more humbling than the others.

For us, the greatest gift people gave us was time. A friend set up a care calendar, where anyone could sign up to come do after-dinner dishes, or wash-dry-fold a couple of loads of laundry, or make a run to the grocery store, or drop off a pre-cooked or easy-to-cook meal, or whatever other thing we needed that would otherwise have taken up our time.

By doing that, they let us use our time for other things. During the day, we could do the legwork of looking for treatment options, or the administrative paperwork of consent forms and privacy releases to try to qualify for studies, or arrange travel details when needed, or run errands that were really best done by us—things like grocery store runs. In the evening, we could concentrate on the kids’ bedtime and take our time with it, allowing a longer bath and adding an extra bedtime story and so on. We could be fully present for every one of Rebecca’s limited and dwindling number of bedtimes, and spend extra time with Carolyn and Joshua as they went through the same difficult passage with us. We didn’t have to short them while we concentrated on their dying sister; we could concentrate on all three, because we weren’t distracted by the back-brain awareness of undone chores.

I cannot overstate how incredibly valuable a gift that is. Not one of us can earn, steal, or otherwise acquire even an instant of extra time. Our time comes to us all at the same rate, never a surplus or deficit, and is of limited duration. Every one of those caring helpers came and spent some of their time, time every bit as finite and unreclaimable as ours, so that we could put our time to other uses. They sacrificed time with their families so we could be with ours. There is no gift that could ever be more precious than that.

It’s definitely hard to give that gift from a distance. What do you do if you know someone several states or oceans away who needs that same gift? Traveling to be with them, taking over that care role for a few days, is an amazing gift, but it’s obviously a lot easier if you live a few streets or suburbs away. Gift certificates for food delivery services or favorite restaurants or Amazon are a decent substitute if you can’t be there in person, though check to make sure the recipient isn’t already flooded with them.

Thankfully, we didn’t need help with expenses. Our health insurance’s deductibles and co-pays were well within our ability to pay them, and we were otherwise able to meet our financial obligations. Not everyone is nearly so lucky.

So what about someone who isn’t so lucky, who’s coping with crisis and tragedy, or for that matter a massively time-consuming joyful event like a newborn child, in addition to an almost-empty bank account? Money is time. Seriously. Donating to a fund for them, or even just sending a check, could keep them from having to work a second job to make ends meet, right when they need as much time as they can get. It could keep them from having to worry about the rent, food on the table, co-payments for office visits and medicine. Or even just straight-up payments for office visits and medicine, if (like far too many in America) they don’t have insurance at all. You might keep them from bankruptcy.

If nothing else, a donation can help them avoid added stress. Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can greatly reduce pressure and worry and stress and strife, which is very close to the same thing. To be able to just pay for something rather than have to figure out whether it’s within the budget, whether it’s really that important, frees up that energy to concentrate on making better decisions, to put that energy toward making life a little better for themselves and their loved ones.

And of course, if you’re able, you can still offer to come clean up their living room, do the dishes one night a week, watch a little one for an afternoon, ferry a child to and from school, or whatever else they might need.

It really is the greatest possible gift.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/08/04/the-gift-of-time/feed/7Stress Fractureshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/02/stress-fractures/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/02/stress-fractures/#commentsMon, 02 Jun 2014 15:53:58 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=2832As word of Rebecca’s diagnosis spread throughout our network of friends and acquaintances, we are told, more than one person said, “That’s why she was placed with the Meyers. If anyone can handle something like this, it’s them.”

It’s flattering, I suppose, to be thought of that way. Certainly it’s better than having people say, “Oh crap, that’s about to be a Category 5 train wreck!” But how many couples were thought of the same way we were, and ended up separating? Do they get marked in the false-predictions column, a lesson that we don’t know other people as well as we think we do? Probably not. Selection bias runs strong, especially when it comes to our assessments of others. When our guesses about other people are right, we take it as proof of our insight; when they’re wrong, we tend to shrug it off as “people change” and forget that we’re often wrong about other people, never mind ourselves.

What concerns me is that this kind of thinking can easily lead to thinking that those who face crisis and stay together are strong, wise, noble—and that those who don’t, aren’t. It makes a morality play of how people cope with events largely beyond their control, which is unfair no matter how things turn out.

After all, it’s not actually the stress of a crisis that drives people apart. What breaks a relationship is how the people in it react to the stress, and (even more importantly) how they react to each other’s reactions. Under stress, and particularly under extreme crisis, we are tested in entirely new ways, and our legitimate and honest reactions may or may not be acceptable to our partners.

To pick an example that didn’t happen, suppose that Kat and I had disagreed about where to take Rebecca for proton therapy. One of our other choices was Bloomington, IN, about two hours closer to home than Philadelphia and definitely closer to several of my relatives. Suppose I had decided that was where we should go, and Kat had decided that Philadelphia was best.

Already, that’s the seeds for a major conflict, because it is, in a very real sense, a life-or-death choice. It’s not like arguing about where to go for dinner. It’s a fundamental disagreement over a fundamentally critical choice.

Now, suppose that one or both of us reacted to other’s decision with outrage, panic, even scorn: “How could you think that way? How could you endanger our daughter like that?” And been met with outrage over the outrage, if you see what I mean. Both of us being unable to understand how the other could act and react in such a way, when the right answer seemed so obvious. That’s a fracture that will not easily heal.

Or, to pick another example that didn’t happen, suppose one of us had felt that they couldn’t stay in the PICU ward with Rebecca as she lay half-conscious, waiting for surgery after surgery. Suppose one of us had stayed in a nearby hotel. You might feel an instant, instinctual contempt for such an act, even knowing that it didn’t happen in our case. We both stayed by her side non-stop, to the point that people started gently urging us to take some breaks away. On rare occasion, we actually listened.

Come back to that contempt, though—how could a parent run away from a sick child? Yet some parents do, and to judge them for that is contemptible in its own right. Perhaps they know their anxiety, terror, and anguish would be so amplified by staying that they would do more harm than good. Perhaps they know they would break down, become almost catatonic and unable to help anyone. Perhaps they know they would go effectively crazy, and endanger their child and themselves.

Whatever the reasons, suppose one of us had stayed away. How would the other have reacted to that? With compassion? Sympathy? Feelings of betrayal? Scorn? Contempt? Righteous anger? All of the above?

Or more recently, when I cracked and had to set a limit for my own good, what if Kat had been unable to accept that limit? What if what I needed was the exact opposite of what she needed, forcing us to choose which one of us didn’t get what they needed? That sort of conflict can easily sow resentment, and resentment can easily become anger and contempt and worse.

It’s pretty easy to see how, no matter how deep their love, a couple might split up over such differences. Maybe not in the throes of crisis, but sooner or later.

Had we had split up, people might have said, “Oh my, I guess they weren’t strong enough to handle it after all.” That would sound true, but it would be a lie. You could have the two strongest people in the world split up just because they can’t accept how the other deals with a crisis.

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise, even though it so often does. It’s astonishing enough that any of us can find someone who’s sufficiently compatible to live with us full-time, with all our quirks and foibles and failings, someone who can accept the way we hang the toilet paper roll, squeeze the toothpaste tube, and load the dishwasher. To have that same someone accept, let alone admire, the way we react to extreme crisis… that’s luck so incredible as to defy belief.

I’m not saying anything your local therapist or religious leader doesn’t already know. They see this play out over and over, year upon year. I just want to remind the rest of us that it isn’t strength that keeps a couple together in the face of crisis. It’s having the luck to remain compatible under the most extreme pressures. Like any complex interaction between two complex systems, the outcome is fundamentally unpredictable. If an unresolvable incompatibility is uncovered, it doesn’t mean the people involved are weak or undeserving. It just means they’re people.

(Just in case anyone takes this as some sort of veiled announcement, Kat and I are not getting nor plan to get nor have any expectation of getting a divorce. We both hope it will stay that way—a point of compatibility all its own.)

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/02/stress-fractures/feed/12An Event Apart 2014 Schedules, Round Onehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/11/25/an-event-apart-2014-schedules-round-one/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/11/25/an-event-apart-2014-schedules-round-one/#commentsMon, 25 Nov 2013 20:00:19 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=2754An Event Aparts of 2014 have been announced.]]>I’ve recently had the odd experience of seeing from the outside something that I usually get to see from the inside: the schedules and workshops for the first three An Event Aparts of 2014 have been announced. Those shows are:

All the shows feature a great mix of veterans and new faces, all coming together to bring our usual blend of looking to the future while staying firmly grounded in the details of the here-and-now. The shows include workshops from Luke Wroblewski (in Atlanta or Boston) or Josh Clark (in Seattle) about mobile and touch design.

Ordinarily, at this point I’d say “hope to see you there!” but I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to hold up my side of that. The same family crisis that forced me to withdraw from the last four AEAs of 2013 has also kept me off the roster for at least the first three shows of 2014, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to travel even to visit. I’ll continue to be a part of the show, but behind the scenes, at least for now.

And that crisis is why I got to experience the announcements from the outside. While I was in Philadelphia, I was basically on extended medical leave from AEA, with the team picking up every scrap of my duties they could. They pretty much soaked up 99%+ of what I do daily, sparing me the worry of day-to-day operations and leaving me free to focus everything I could on my daughter and family during a very difficult period. I am forever indebted. I can’t ever thank them enough for what they did for me. I am beyond fortunate to have had such a strong team of friends and colleagues at my back.

I will say that it was a good thing for me to experience the process from the audience, as it were, gaining a new perspective on what we do and how we do it. I certainly don’t recommend a major crisis as the best way to gain that perspective, but I have a newfound appreciation for the value of stepping outside of the process as completely as possible. You might be very surprised by how things look from out there.

But back to the point: the complete agendas are up for the first three AEAs of 2014, so go check them out! And if you’re at all interested, I wouldn’t wait to register any longer than absolutely necessary. Every show for the past two or three years has sold out weeks or months in advance, and cancellation rates are low enough that it’s pretty rare for people on the waiting list to get in. I hope you’ll be there!

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/11/25/an-event-apart-2014-schedules-round-one/feed/0Glasshousehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/03/07/glasshouse/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/03/07/glasshouse/#commentsThu, 07 Mar 2013 17:08:50 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=2160Our youngest tends to wake up fairly early in the morning, at least as compared to his sisters, and since I need less sleep than Kat I’m usually the one who gets up with him. This morning, he put away a box he’d just emptied of toys and I told him, “Well done!” He turned to me, stuck his hand up in the air, and said with glee, “Hive!”

I gave him the requested high-five, of course, and then another for being proactive. It was the first time he’d ever asked for one. He could not have looked more pleased with himself.

And I suddenly realized that I wanted to be able to say to my glasses, “Okay, dump the last 30 seconds of livestream to permanent storage.”

There have been concerns raised about the impending crowdsourced panopticon that Google Glass represents. I share those concerns, though I also wonder if the pairing of constant individual surveillance with cloud-based storage mediated through wearable CPUs will prove out an old if slightly recapitalized adage: that an ARMed society is a polite society. Will it? We’ll see—pun unintentional but unavoidable, very much like the future itself.

And yet. You think that you’ll remember all those precious milestones, that there is no way on Earth you could ever forget your child’s first word, or the first time they took their first steps, or the time they suddenly put on an impromptu comedy show that had you on the floor laughing. But you do forget. Time piles up and you forget most of everything that ever happened to you. A few shining moments stay preserved, and the rest fade into the indistinct fog of your former existence.

I’m not going to hold up my iPhone or Android or any other piece of hardware all the time, hoping that I’ll manage to catch a few moments to save. That solution doesn’t scale at all, but I still want to save those moments. If my glasses (or some other device) were always capturing a video buffer that could be dumped to permanent storage at any time, I could capture all of those truly important things. I could go back and see that word, that step, that comedy show. I would do that. I wanted to do it, sitting on the floor of my child’s room this morning.

That was when I realized that Glass is inevitable. We’re going to observe each other because we want to preserve our own lives—not every last second, but the parts that really matter to us. There will be a whole host of side effects, some of which we can predict but most of which will surprise us. I just don’t believe that we can avoid it. Even if Google fails with Glass, someone else will succeed with a very similar project, and sooner than we expect. I’ve started thinking about how to cope with that outcome. Have you?

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/03/07/glasshouse/feed/7Optimized For the Fast-Fading Pasthttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2012/10/12/optimized-for-the-fast-fading-past/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2012/10/12/optimized-for-the-fast-fading-past/#commentsFri, 12 Oct 2012 19:31:30 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=2024I have a theory, one that I’m sure has been formulated by someone else much earlier than me, that all power users eventually get left behind. They get stuck in a highly-optimized box canyon of their own making, one that is perfectly tuned to their way of working and interacting with data and is of interest to precisely nobody else in the world.

Let me use myself as an example. I’m currently running OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, with no intention of upgrading. This is because after Snow Leopard, there is no more Rosetta. That means that my preferred personal mail client, Eudora, will not work. Neither will Word 2004. Both are, in effect, upgrade deal-breakers for me.

But why would I hang on to such relics?

Well, Eudora has been my mail client for quite literally two decades, and thus it has two decades of archived mail that I can search very quickly and easily. I have tried out migrations to other clients; they crash trying to suck in 3GB worth of mail text in Eudora’s special format. I could simply declare a break and move on to a new client with no stored mail, but as soon as I upgrade my OS, even the archives will be inaccessible. This is a major barrier. There are possible solutions, but trying them is incredibly time-intensive with no actual guarantee of success.

As for Word 2004, I have it customized so that ⇧⌘S shifts keyboard focus to the Styles combo box. There I can type the name of the style I want and hit return. This is really important when I’m writing a book whose files eventually have to be passed off to a publisher’s production staff, whose toolchains depend on proper use of styles. O’Reilly in particular went to a lot of effort, back in the day, to create style who had vi-style shortcut names, so I can highlight a few words and type ⇧⌘S fc [return] to set the highlighted text in the “literal” style (used for property names and the like). Versions of Word after 2004 do not possess this feature. I own Word 2011, and often use it to view documents sent to me by others, but I can’t use it as an efficient book-authoring tool because it amputated a feature I use a lot.

So the objection isn’t a simple “I like what I know, dadgumit!”, though of course I do like what I know (we all do). The real problem is “I have built my workflow around these things, and breaking them is unacceptable”.

I hear similar complaints from my designer friends. They’ve gotten so expert at using a particular piece of software that they bemoan even the hint that it will get a significant ‘upgrade’—which often sounds like “break everything I do while likely adding a metric ton of crap I don’t need” to the power user—or even be discontinued. Although for the power user, discontinuing is often preferable; at least when software is discontinued, it works exactly as you expect for as long as you can keep it running.

The web doesn’t inherently fix this problem, either. When Twitter finally retired the API access points that Twitterrific 3 depended upon, my desktop Twitter client irretrievably broke. Why not upgrade to the latest Twitterrific? Because version 3 allowed me to display my timeline with all tweets collapsed, except for the currently-active tweet. It was an incredibly compact, high-density, useful interface. Version 4 does not permit it. no other Twitter client I’ve tried permits it. In fact, every other Twitter client I’ve tried has come off as cartoonishly clumsy and sprawlingly obtrusive when compared to the sleekness of Twitterrific 3—including, as I say, the newer version of the very same Twitter client.

Granted, that’s more of a UI preference than a functionality problem, but UI preferences are often what drive us to use things, or not use them. I’m much now less present on Twitter than I was before the break, and when I do go on Twitter, it’s either via the official Twitter client on my iPhone or via twitter.com itself on the desktop.

Getting back to my increasingly-aging OS version, it helps that, to echo one my long-time personal heroes Tim Bray, I have no particular interest in what’s come after Snow Leopard. Dragging window edges might be nice, but I’ve lived without it for a very long time and rarely ever missed it. (Not never, but rarely.)

Yes, the newer OS X versions have a whole bunch of hip new cloud features, but in my case that’s actually a bug, not a feature. I instinctively distrust cloud-based storage for a variety of reasons. The security concerns are pretty significant for me, and for that matter having everything stored remotely is a good idea only if I have 100% reliable network access everywhere I go. Well, I don’t (and neither do you).

But of course the rest of the world is moving in a different direction, leaving people like me behind. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has gone mad, or is wrong to move in the direction it does. This isn’t a querulous demand that everything be frozen in the spot I like because if it was good enough ten years ago, it’s good enough now. That’s not how the world works. What I’m doing here, if I’m doing anything worthwhile at all, is documenting the point at which I came to the end of my box canyon, pulled out a guitar, and strummed a quiet ballad to the memory of my own forward progress.

As I say, I think all this happens to every power user at some point or another. We become enmeshed in a web of interlocking dependencies, and sooner or later lock ourselves into a particular place. The odds of it happening increase with age, but that’s less a function of biological age than it is elapsed time. The younger you start, the younger you’re likely to reach this point.

I will have to exit my canyon eventually, of course—but when, how, and why all remain very open questions, and I do not look forward to the turbulent transition periods that are likely to follow.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2012/10/12/optimized-for-the-fast-fading-past/feed/18Memetic Epidemiologyhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/11/05/memetic-epidemiology/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/11/05/memetic-epidemiology/#commentsFri, 05 Nov 2010 18:26:48 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=1406I had planned to spend yesterday goofing off, as is my tradition for the day after I return from a conference and don’t have anything immediately pressing on my plate. Instead I watched and documented, as best I could, a case of memetic epidemiology happen in realtime.

The meme was the Cooks Source story, which I stumbled across relatively early in the day. I won’t recap the story here, as the original LiveJournal post by Monica Gaudio and Edward Champion’s very well-researched article do a much better job of that. The latter piece is particularly commendable if you’re new to the story, as it not only explains the genesis of the incident but also lays bare a number of other things that were discovered as the story went ballistic.

I’m not sure exactly where I first came across the story—probably a retweet of Adam Banks by a friend of mine—but at the time the meme was really just getting started. At that point there were quite a few people posting on the Cooks Source Facebook Wall to chastise the editor, and the rate of posting was accelerating. I threw in my own tweet on the topic and kept watching the Wall to see if there would be a response, if the Facebook page would be deleted, or something else. At the same time, I was seeing more and more tweets and retweets of the story, and based on just what I could see, it seemed primed to go crazy. I was rewteeted by swissmiss, who has four times as many followers as me (and way more influential followers than me), and it was hitting the feeds of more and more people I follow.

When it showed up on John Scalzi’s tweet stream, I actually got a little dizzy. This was the moment where I felt like the scientist at the beginning of a viral-apocalypse movie, staring at a monitor showing the sites of reported infection in red. Then, in a burst of tense, ominous music, the dots show up in New York City and around JFK. Game over.

I got that feeling because I knew that not only is Mr. Scalzi followed by both Neil Gaiman (1.5 million followers) andWil Wheaton (1.7 million followers), but he is respected and therefore paid attention to by both. Furthermore, both, as net-savvy content creators like Mr. Scalzi, are exquisitely sensitive to such stories. It was only a matter of time before one of them passed the story on to their followers. And sure enough, within minutes, Neil Gaiman did so.

At that point, it seemed only a matter of time before traditional media channels took interest, and though it took a little while, many did. It literally became an international news story.

Throughout the day, I tracked the situation and tweeted about it as new developments happened. I almost couldn’t help myself; I was completely captivated by watching a meme unfold and spread in realtime. Eventually I hit on a crude measurement of the story’s reach, which I dubbed the Speed of Chastisement (SoC). This was measured by loading the Cooks Source Wall and then scrolling to the bottom of the page, down to the “Older posts” button. The time elapsed since the last of the Wall posts was the SoC. When I started looking at it, it was measurable in minutes, but as the day went on the interval dropped. At one point, it was as low as 34 seconds, and may well have dropped lower when I wasn’t looking.

I wish I could’ve automatically captured that number, say, every minute, because the timeline graph I could make with that data would be fascinating—especially if mapped against various developments, like Neil Gaiman’s retweet of John Scalzi or the time of various article publications.

One of the things I found most fascinating was how the outraged mob used Cooks Source’s own digital presence against it. I don’t actually mean all the Wall posts, which served as an emotional outlet but otherwise only indicated the story’s memetic velocity (the SoC I mentioned earlier). What people did was start new threads in the Discussions tab of Cooks Source’s own Facebook page to document the original sources of Cooks Source articles and to compile the contact information for all of the advertisers in Cooks Source. The speed at which the crowd operated was awesome in the older sense of that word as inspiring of awe, which is itself defined as power to inspire fear or reverence. As I told a friend, I was fascinated in the same way I’d be fascinated watching, from a distance, a predator hunting down its prey. Awe-struck. It was almost frightening to watch how fast people tracked down the various text and image sources, uncovering more and more evidence of bad behavior at full-bore, redlined Internet speed.

On a related point, I was very impressed by the quality of reporting in Edward Champion’s article about the story. Alone of all the articles I’ve seen (beyond the first couple of LJ posts), his laid out specific examples of repurposed content, and furthermore he had talked to people involved and gotten their perspective and to people at some of the sites and companies whose material had been re-used. Read the article, if you didn’t already follow one of the links. It is investigative journalism done far better than any reporter has yet done for any traditional, or even “new media”, news outlet.

I could write about all this for much longer, but I’m going to hold off. My day wasn’t all just observation and tweets, though. A few questions kept hovering in the back of my mind.

What if the mob had been wrong?

Imagine with me for a moment that a small crocheting magazine is accused of copyright violation by an author. The editor, knowing this to be false, sends a dismissive or even sarcastic letter (we’ve all done it). The author posts their side of the story and excerpts of the letter to their blog, people notice, and suddenly the Flash Mob of Righteousness is back in business.

What then? Is it possible, once the rope is out and being tied into a noose, to put it away again?

Did Cooks Source actually win?

As I write this, about 24 hours after the story really blew up, the Cooks Source Facebook page has gone from 110 people who “Like This” to almost 3,400. Most of those are because in order to comment on the Wall, you have to Like the page, and a whole lot of people hit “Like”, commented, and then hit “Unlike”. Some of them are still listed because they’re still posting. Still, assume that by the time it’s all over, between people who want to keep harassing Cooks Source and people who just forgot to hit “Unlike”, they’ll have well over a thousand people listed. That’s a full order of magnitude jump in claimed like.

Is that a measure of success? Will it, in fact, end up a net positive for Cooks Source as it tries to entice advertisers for future issues? Of course, that assumes the magazine survives the attention of lawyers from Disney, Paula Deen Enterprises, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, the Food Network, Sunset, National Public Radio, and so on and so on.

What about Gene Simmons?

A few weeks back, Gene Simmons (of KISS fame) said that anyone who illegally shares files should be “sued off the face of the earth” and that bands should be litigious about people copying their music. In response, his web site was cracked and a good deal of derision was directed his way.

Interesting. In one case, a content creator who calls for vigorous defense of copyright is attacked for it. In another, a violator of copyright is attacked. How many of the people who Wall-bombed Cooks Source’s Facebook page were also cheering the anonymous crackers who harassed Gene Simmons? Why the disconnect?

There are many reasons we could cite, and I think the most likely factor is that in both cases, the targets of attack were publicly arrogant and uncompromising about their positions. That, however, is absolutely no excuse. If you were outraged by Cooks Source, shouldn’t you cheer Gene Simmons’ stance? If you rolled your eyes Gene Simmons, shouldn’t you be on the side of Cooks Source?

I imagine there are people who did one or the other of those things. But not many. The contrast says something about how we collectively view intellectual property, and it may not be something we want to face.

This isn’t the first time someone will set off an outrage swarm, and it won’t be the last. There is much to think about here, about both ourselves and the medium we inhabit.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/11/05/memetic-epidemiology/feed/14A Matter of Consciencehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/10/17/a-matter-of-conscience/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/10/17/a-matter-of-conscience/#commentsSun, 18 Oct 2009 01:51:14 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=1171
So Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell has gained national notoriety for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple, referring them instead to another justice to have the marriage performed. His action has, of course, provoked a great deal of condemnation. Pretty much every elected Louisiana official above Mr. Bardwell (and plenty of them to either side) in the administrative hierarchy has called for his removal from his position. That goes all the way up to Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who said:

“This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately – including the revoking of his license.”

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

It interested me because it’s exactly the kind of reasoning that underlies “conscience protection” laws that exempt medical professionals who wish to refuse participation in abortion, or dispensation of contraception.

So now I’m very curious to know whether what pro-life groups have to say about what this man has done and how he’s done it. Or, for that matter, what Governor Jindal himself now thinks of the bill he recently signed into law.

You see, for the entire second half of Election Day, from almost noon until after midnight, Eastern time, I was aboard a Continental flight to Tokyo. We had video-on-demand systems but not live satellite television, so as we arced over Canada, Alaska, and the northern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, we flew in ignorance. As Jeremy Keith put it regarding his own flight to Japan, we were aboard Schrödinger‘s Airplane.

For me, the wave collapsed as we began the initial descent toward Narita. One of the flight attendants, having announced that they were starting the initial-descent procedures and would like us to check around our seats for any personal items we might like to start stowing, added: “And for those of you interested in the results of the election, we have a new President: Barack Obama.”

There was a burst of applause from the economy section of the plane. In business class, there was silence.

Well, not quite. I was myself sitting in business class, thanks to a great big pile of reward miles and some lucky timing in calling the airline. As I heard her say Obama’s name, I let out an involuntary “Wow“. Because until that moment, deep down I had believed, truly believed, that Mr. Obama would not win the Presidency. That was not the outcome I desired, but it was the outcome I expected.

I am in many ways ashamed of my doubts and fears, because I had thought less of my fellow Americans than they deserved.

Since then, from here in Tokyo, I’ve felt weirdly disconnected from what’s happened. In time zone terms, I’m fourteen hours in my home’s future, half a day ahead of everyone back home. But because I received word after it was all over and soon after slept through America’s Wednesday daylight hours, I feel like I’m a day behind. Time and distance combine to create a feeling of disconnectedness from the end result, as though I’m getting word of election results in Germany or India or Australia: interesting, but something seen at a remove.

It’s odd. I’m used to being an observer, but this is something else entirely. I think it’s pure astonishment.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/11/05/shock-and-awe/feed/17Placementhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/09/14/placement/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/09/14/placement/#commentsSun, 14 Sep 2008 15:25:39 +0000http://meyerweb.com/?p=940People magazine, and something about the cover seemed a little bit... off. Do you see it, too?]]>
I was in line to buy a few groceries and spotted the latest issue of People magazine in the point-of-sale magazine rack, the one with the McCain family on the cover. Something about the cover just seemed a little bit… off. Do you see it, too?

There’s a metaphor there, but I’m having trouble deciding exactly what it is, or perhaps more accurately to whom it applies.

Seriously, I’m not generally one to read messages into things—in fact, I probably lean too far the other direction—but on this? Somebody needs to be fired for gross negligence, because there’s a message being sent here, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, it’s worse if it’s unintentional. The question is who was negligent. The photographer for not seeing what the placement communicated? The editor for approving use of the image on their cover? The McCain campaign for approving the image in the first place?

Maybe all of the above.

I’ll be very interested in people’s responses on this one… and even more in People‘s response, should anyone ask them about it.